Socrates | Critical Essay by E. Zeller

SOURCE: "Sources and Characteristics of the Philosophy of Socrates," in Socrates and The Socratic Schools, translated by E. Zeller and Oswald J. Reichel, Longmans, Green and Co., 1868, pp. 82-149.

In the following essay, Zeller discusses the questions surrounding the validity of Xenophon and Plato as Socratic sources and identifies Socrates's quest for "true knowledge" as the heart of the philosopher's intellectual and moral theories.

There is considerable difficulty in arriving at an accurate view of the philosophy of Socrates, owing to the discrepancies in the accounts of the original authorities. Socrates himself committed nothing to writing,1 and there are only the works of two of his pupils, Xenophon and Plato, preserved, in which he is made to speak in his own person.2 But the accounts of these two writers are so little alike, that we gather from the one quite a different view of the...